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Friday, 16 November 2012

Well it's not completely new announcement, but since I've not written about this yet - and some people might've totally missed the fact that "Carmageddon: Reincarnation" was successfully funded in June at kickstarter.com under shadow of bigger budget "Wasteland 2" and "Shadowrun Returns" in April - lets present the game! Carmageddon: Reincarnation raised $625,143 budget out of $400 000 goal and has been in the development ever since for PC systems. Full version should come out in February 2013.

The team behind game is "Stainless Games", who still have 5 members out of 8 in their ranks who worked with the original release, with overall team size of approximately 50 people. The original creators once lost rights to the franchise, but bought it back with over third million, successfully funded the game, and are now SET TO GO (and I'm so damned late to say that).

So what is Carmageddon?

(Do you remember this? One of my favorite game intros of all times (1997))

Original Carmageddon (1997) featured crazy opponents, spiked front-bumpers, heavy metal, hugely varying real world environments turned into killing fields, free roaming, nasty power-ups, insane arcade-like physics, and being awarded of running over people and cows with bloody death scenes.

That pretty much sums it up. The game raised quite bit a controversy in 1997 about it's encouraging way of awarding player for ruthlessly driving over (and thru) pedestrians. The game was banned in several countries like UK and Brazil, with Germany having pedestrians replaced by robots. The game got two sequels with Carmageddon 2 being respectable effort while Carmageddon TDR less respected one.

But under the surface of dark humor boasting bloody graphics original Carmageddon was also great game to play. The game was really action packed with it's hectic atmosphere, while you had time limit to complete map any way you'd like either eliminating all the opponents by crushing them with your vehicle, or racing through all the checkpoints. The 3D physics were fun, despite not being realistic at all - and were supported with most insane and fun power-ups either helping to eliminate pedestrians (electric shock, frozen pedestrians etc.), eliminating opponents, or worst of it working against your advantage. Getting "pinball mode" power-up and falling down from a cliff few seconds later wouldn't do no good for your car.

Also who wouldn't remember the main character "Max Damage", psychopathic twisted-minded driver, starring in great cut-scenes as well as in-game being "animated talking head" reacting to the events and happenings of the race.

(concept art of Reincarnation)

Carmageddon: Reincarnation promises to bring back all that. With updated graphics of course as well remakes of old cars, maps, and drivers -- as well as something new. The ratio between old and freshly new stuff is bit unknown at this point although seemingly leaning much more towards including as much classic Carmageddon stuff as possible. And I know they're focusing on crazy power-ups again since they're already discussing about them with fans.

Included is also multiplayer mode updated from old LAN parties to modern day level with easier multiplayer connection between friends. Focus in single player should still be one of the major factions though. Now also possible will be sharing your action replays in Youtube. One thing I'm not so sure about is linking in-game to Facebooks and Twitters somehow (it's function not exactly explained yet).

The team got some work to do though as with nowadays standards at least physics of the original game could use some update (but please them insane and unrealistic!) -- and hopefully they won't dumb down original gruesome dark humor at all.